Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, my questions today are for the Minister for Education, Culture and Employment.
My first question is what is the challenge to making the NWT Arts Strategy arm's length and why was this not initially just put into the art strategy as a deliverable? Thank you.
Thank you, Member for Kam Lake. Minister responsible for Education, Culture and Employment.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The type of arts council structure that the Member's speaking about, they are usually born out of a grassroots organization, a group of artists that get together and has a vision, has a plan, and it's an organization that then can be supported.
There is currently no organization in the territory that has that ability at this point. There's a number of different organizations, and maybe if they all combine their power, that might be an organization that we might be able to support. But that's just not the case. These are generally grassroots organizations. And while the GNWT has been asked to start a grassroots organization that could turn into an arts council, but that's just not the way things work. So is one of the impediments.
The other impediment is the fact that the O and M for such an organization would be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and that is the money that currently goes directly to artists. So we would have to take that from artists, put it towards office space, executive director, travel, all of those types of things. So those are a couple of the impediments. I'll just leave it at that for now. I know the Member has more questions. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, there's another way that we can do this. We could drive it from the GNWT outwards. It doesn't have to be, you know, continuing on with the whole notion and the age-old anecdote of the "starving artist." We can actually prop our artists up, give them an opportunity to bring in huge amounts of dollars into the territory, and go at it from a GNWT perspective, which I think is what a lot of people are asking for given the GNWT already does have a program that supports artists, and we want to be able to see that organization grow.
And so I'm wondering how long will it take the GNWT to complete "the action," explore the creation of an NWT arts association, and what are the measurable deliverables that the Minister sees coming out of that? Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The work has begun under the arts strategy to look at the programs, look at how we fund different organizations, and that is the work to determine whether or not something like an arts council would be the way to go.
We provide more funding for the arts and culture in the Northwest Territories than any other jurisdiction in Canada per capita outside of the Yukon. So it's not like we are not providing these supports. But we also provide we spend twice as much on education per capita as the rest of Canada, three times as much on policing. I don't know how much more on health. So there's not unlimited money to go around and get everything we want. And I've had conversations with the Member recently that, you know, we need to really look at what we want to keep, never mind what we want to add. So there are very real budget discussions that we need to have about how we spend our money, and we are doing the work right now to inform those discussions. I don't want to commit half a million dollars to support an organization without some real solid grounds to do so. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. And I agree with the Minister, the GNWT cannot continue to grow its budget and expand its wallet a whole heck of a lot more than it already is doing. And this is what this organization would do, it would give the artists of the Northwest Territories an opportunity to bring in private and federal public dollars so that we can grow this wallet, so to speak, of NWT artists. And so I'm wondering how the GNWT intends to support northern artists to fulfill this work of the deliverable from the strategy to explore the creation of an NWT arts association. How is ECE going to include artists in this conversation to help propel it forward? Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. There will be engagement that's going to happen to get that feedback from artists, and that's going to begin likely early in the new year. So we are going to engage, and we're going to talk to them, and we're going to listen. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Minister. Final supplementary, Member for Kam Lake.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I think I could well, a lot of my colleagues could probably attest to the fact that I'm slightly hard of hearing, but I'm pretty sure I heard a sigh from a lot of artists of the Northwest Territories on that one.
Before I was even elected, before any of us were elected into the 19th Assembly, ITI and ECE did engage with artists across the Northwest Territories. They invested a lot of time and a lot of effort, and it was very well received from the artists of the Northwest Territories. And so I think people would be frustrated in order to go back and say the same things: We want independence. We want infrastructure. We want core funding. These are a lot of the things that we hear. We heard from the Member from Yellowknife North say the same thing. And so I'm wondering from the Minister, then, what will be different this time? Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And, you know, what the Member's talking about, it might be, I'm not going to infer too much, but I think the engagement on the arts strategy, and she's right, what we heard, we want more funding, more infrastructure, more of basically everything. And the fact is that we can't build a plan based on just more of everything. So we need to go out and say this is what we have now. These are the pots of money that we have. This is how we fund artists. Is this working? Is this pot of money working? And then from there we determine perhaps we can put money elsewhere, and it might be in an arts organization, to help us access third party funding. But we need something a little more structured, a little less high level. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Minister. Oral questions, Member for Hay River South.
